Our Infosec show diary on Wednesday brought you news of ripped posters, fire and underpants.
So it's time we raised the level of discussion for our latest roundup from the annual IT security shindig, which is located in Earls Court for the first time this year.
Security rockstars take a bow (Whitfield Diffie far left and Phil …

@AC 30Apr09 20:31

democratic eVoting

Democratic eVoting is as impossible as time travel.

The main problem is that a democratic voting protocoll needs to be completely understandable and verifiable by the large mayority of the population. It's no good if you need a degree in mathematics to be able to understand it, or you need to disassemble code stored in a ROM on a computer. Only if at least 90% of the population can understand the system enought to be able to check for fraud themselves, the system is OK. Till now, no other system than pen and paper can provide that.

evoting = impossible

Christian Berger is spot on; but even among a fully computer-literate population, electronic voting would still be unworkable.

There's still no way to verify that the machines really are running the same program whose Source Code you checked.

Direct-recording mechanical voting machines might be acceptable, if they were close enough to universally comprehensible; but they still don't need any less scrutiny than paper ballots, and are really only workable for first-past-the-post elections. For transferrable votes, nothing beats pencil and paper.

Nothing ensures the integrity of the count like have it being done by representatives of the candidates or the candidates themselves. Nobody trusts anyone else, so they only way they can agree is if they are all telling the truth.